Aussie gamers poised to do battle in Call of Duty: Ghosts, which launches at midnight

AUSTRALIA is about to ­embark on an 80-year war; and that'll just be the first week of combat.

Tonight's launch of blockbuster video game Call Of Duty: Ghosts will mark a new digital death-match for hundreds of thousands of Australian gamers.

They'll collectively spend more than 700,000 hours playing the game in the first week alone, if data collected from past editions of the game's franchise is anything to go by.

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That equates to 80 years spent firing machine guns, dodging rockets and cursing through headsets at mates playing online on the same battlefield over seven days.

A shot from the Call of Duty game. Picture: SuppliedSource:Supplied

Aussie hip-hop outfit Bliss n Eso were among the first to get their hands on the game yesterday, thanks to their high profile and a devotion to gaming dating back to the days before modern consoles.

"The gaming world started very young for me," MC Eso, aka Max MacKinnon said.

By the time the first Call Of Duty came out I was hooked."

The COD launch (fans tend to refer to the game simply by its acronym) will further buoy a $1.5 billion-a-year local video game industry ­already soaring thanks to last month's record success of Grand Theft Auto V, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide within three days of its release.

For anyone who has missed the past 10 years of COD combat, the game is what's described as a first-person shooter, with players using an arsenal of weapons to blast their way to victory through a variety of missions.

Battle on the epic digital frontlineSource:Supplied

But the biggest drawcard is the online multiplayer mode, where teams fight ­co-operatively to achieve objectives such as capturing the enemy's flag. For the first time in the franchise's history, gamers will be able to play as a woman, an indication of the growing number of female gamers, taking it to the blokes.

Research released last month by the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, which represents the local video game industry, revealed that females now make up about 47 per cent of the nation's 9.5 million gamers.

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